INMATES SLEEP ON MATTRESSES IN THE CORRIDORS! IMPOSSIBLE TO WORK LIKE THIS”
Inmates put to sleep on mattresses in the corridors, others cramped in two in a single cell with an exposed bathroom, and in all this context the Penitentiary Police staff who, albeit with great professionalism and humanity, make enormous sacrifices every day to ensure safety and treatment.
It is the merciless photograph of the Trieste District Court, named after Marshal AdC Ernesto Mari, which provides the Autonomous Penitentiary Police Union through the voice of the secretary of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Giovanni Altomare:
“The numbers explain more than a thousand words the catastrophic situation of the Coroneo prison: there are 150 regulation beds and there are over 250 inmates present!
We have prisoners who slept in the corridors, on a mattress, others confined in two in single cells, in which the bathroom is ‘ at sight’, without any privacy. All this to the detriment of what the Constitution itself provides, which provides that punishments must “tend for the re-education of the condemned”.
In this whole context, even the very operation of the Penitentiary Police staff, of the women and men of the Corps who work every day with great professionalism, humanity and self-sacrifice, is inevitably affected in terms of stress and inconvenience”.
For Altomare, “anyone, but especially those with roles of political and institutional responsibility, should come to prison in Trieste to see how the prison police work, the pride not only of the SAPPE and of the entire Corps but of the entire nation, and how the inmates are restricted.
AND It is essential that the institutions take up our appeal again: invest in security to have safer prisons. This also applies to Trieste for all the other detention facilities in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which are marked, more or less, by organic and sometimes even organizational defects, as happens for example in Gorizia, where – as in Trieste – the inmates they were put to sleep in the corridor.”.
“Disdain” regarding what happens in the Trieste prison, the General Secretary of SAPPE, Donato Capece, also expresses it:
“Prison has become like Dante’s hell and this is not acceptable, much less tolerable. SAPPe’s complaint is the urgent need to find concrete solutions to this serious detention situation.
For this reason, the first Union of the Corps, the SAPPE, returns to ask for urgent measures to ensure all the elements necessary to guarantee the safety of the men and women of the Penitentiary Police”.
who expresses solidarity with the staff of the Police Department of the Coroneo prison, reiterates once again that “SAPPE has been denouncing the unsustainable situation of the Triveneto prisons for some time now but the objective fact is that those who should intervene and protect our Agents continue to remain silent and helpless.
For decades we have been asking for the expulsion of foreign prisoners, a third of those currently present in Italy, to make them serve their sentences in their prisons as well as to foresee the reopening of Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals where to put the increasingly numerous prisoners with psychiatric problems , today present in the ordinary prison circuit.
But we also need more technology and more investments: the situation remains alarming, even if the men and women of the Penitentiary Police guarantee order and safety despite particularly stressful and burdensome working conditions”, concludes the SAPPE leader, who once again urges the interventions of the regional Penitentiary Administration and the Ministry of Justice.
Rome, 9 May 2024
Dr. Donato CAPECE – SAPPE general secretary
